The Happy Coder's Toolkit Part I: mtrace

Jan 2, 2007

I have been doing some serious hacking, fixing and refactoring on a codebase for genetics analysis. And I’ve needed tools to go beyond just sprinkling the usual calls to printf around the place to see what’s going on. Hell, I’ve even fired up gdb once - but just to get a stack trace! This is the first of a sporadically released series on tools I’ve found useful. Hopefully they will distill the essential steps of using these tools, as well as expose some extremely useful but lesser known tricks to a wider audience (like the huge number of readers of this blog).

mtrace: Debugging malloc

The memory management provided by the standard libc library with GCC provides a very useful debugging mode, which can be used to detect memory leaks.

To start with, add:

#include <mtrace.h>

to the includes list at the top of your main module. Then add a call to mtrace() right at the very top of main, conditionally compiled, like:

This will install special handlers to intercept calls to malloc/free et al. Then you can enable this feature as required.

At runtime, the MALLOC_TRACE environment variable must be set to the name of the output file to store the extra trace data. If this is not set, mtrace will do nothing!

You can run your program like this:

% MALLOC_TRACE=myapp.mtrace ./myapp -f 123 foo.dat

Once your program has terminated, you can then go ahead and analyse the output using the supplied mtrace tool. You point it to your binary (so it can pull out the symbol table) and to the saved .mtrace file (from above) and - behold! - a big list of all your leakage.